What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

A library at night is full of sounds: The unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.

my great-grandfather had put a permanent ban on any of his works being translated into English, Russian, or French. He was adamant that these three are languages that break all the bones of any work translated into them.

She was carved of rowan wood, and she retained the opinions of trees: one of them being that it was best not to have anything to do with human folk. “Firstly, they cut us down,” Rowan said. “Secondly they’re all insane, though I suppose they can’t help that, being rooted in water instead of earth.”

He was like a boy in a fairy tale; there was a set of steps he was to follow with no concession whatsoever as to how others viewed his actions.

The narrator of the novel was the bar the two poets drank at, and since Semyonova had published the book under the pen name Reb Jones she was hailed as the new Bukowski.

Our Dornička had decided that once you reach your late fifties you can wear whatever you want and nobody can say anything to you about it.

“I just thought you were young, that’s all.” “Nope, just short,”

to look at a key is to get an impression of the lock it was made for,